There are times in which it would be convenient to have actions happen when an MPI process finishes. For example, a routine may do initializations that are useful until the MPI job (or that part of the job that being terminated in the case of dynamically created processes) is finished. This can be accomplished in MPI-2 by attaching an attribute to MPI_COMM_SELF with a callback function. When MPI_FINALIZEis called, it will first execute the equivalent of an MPI_COMM_FREE on MPI_COMM_SELF. This will cause the delete callback function to be executed on all keys associated with MPI_COMM_SELF, in an arbitrary order. If no key has been attached to MPI_COMM_SELF, then no callback is invoked. The ``freeing'' of MPI_COMM_SELF occurs before any other parts of MPI are affected. Thus, for example, calling MPI_FINALIZED will return false in any of these callback functions. Once done with MPI_COMM_SELF, the order and rest of the actions taken by MPI_FINALIZE is not specified.
Advice
to implementors.
Since attributes can be added from any supported language, the MPI
implementation needs to remember the creating language so the correct
callback is made.
( End of advice to implementors.)